Week two of home schooling and home pre-schooling – here we go!
A few months ago I created a rod for my back when I started cutting the children’s toast in to funny shapes (dinosaur teeth, stars etc.). Having run out ideas I made the mistake of then asking the kids how they wanted me to cut their toast. So far they’ve asked for houses and castles (relatively easy as they’re quite blocky), but today was a new one – James wanted a volcano. A damn volcano! I think my effort was pretty good even if it’s lacking definition and doesn’t quite convey the raw explosive power of an actual volcano.
James had a productive morning of learning. He loves his number worksheets – well done Megan for tracking those down and having the foresight to print a load before lockdown! James was keen to tell us how he’s got on: “I done numbers with my aeroplanes and cars”. Brilliant!
Megan had a work call in the morning so I was in charge of entertaining the kids. A daunting task but I had a stock of board games to help grease the wheels. I ended up choosing a game called Rhino Hero as it involved both construction and destruction. Of the two, the kids were absolutely more interested in making the building collapse than trying to make it as big as possible. Who could have possibly guessed that!
Once we’d finished with the board game Genevieve wanted to gave me an impromptu fitness class. This mostly consisted of quite aggressive star jumping. Apparently you do star jumps by pretending to be a star and then a pencil, but it’s important you really shout “star” and “pencil” as you do it. Brilliant!
When Megan took back the educational reins the afternoon became much more artistic. Creativity is definitely not my comfort zone! Genevieve did a wonderful painting of Uranus. She was very keen to tell me that “[Uranus] lays on its side because people think an asteroid might have hit it”. James also created a beautiful space scene.
The space-related shenanigans continued as Megan set the kids a Duplo challenge – they had to build alien rockets! You can see below that they both excelled themselves at the challenge (and there was only minor bickering throughout).
Grandma Lindsey and Grandad Lawrie had posted through some monster bingo in their most recent letters to the children. Grandad Lawrie had far too much fun calling out the colours and shapes, and the kids had a whale of a time marking off their monsters.
Just before dinner James decided he’d do his best Andrex puppy impression and ended up rolling the toilet paper out of the loo and in to the porch. Doesn’t he realise how precious that stuff is nowadays!
Megan had made meatballs and vegetable ragu for dinner. It was a big hit and lead to James exclaiming “Mum, your meatballs are the greatest”. A resoundingly positive review! For pudding the kids chopped up their own fruit using their special child-friendly chopping knives (and they finished with the same number of fingers which is a success in anyone’s book).
During my virtual beers with my chums last night, it broke my heart to see my friend Dom heating up leftover mulled wine from Christmas because he’d run out of beer. Megan had popped to McColl’s earlier and noted they’d just restocked their beer. So, in the spirit of keeping our friends happy and well stocked, I picked up some beer for Dom (and some chocolate for his pregnant wife Kathryn) and left them a special delivery on their doorstep. He was one happy chappy!
For bedtime the children listened to Dr Seuss’s “Horton Hears a Hoo” read by the one and only Jeff Goldblum. Sadly I was busy tidying the kitchen so I didn’t get to hear his silky smooth reading voice – we’ll have to have another listen later in the week.
And Megan also made her book narration debut. To keep her pupils engaged and entertained during lockdown, Megan recorded and then edited together a brilliant video of “The Incredible Journey” by Tom Burlison. As well as just reading through the book, she also created challenges to the pupils to complete relating to the book. My wife really is a marvel.
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